Not content with a long and distinguished career as a highly respected writer, journalist and broadcaster on religious affairs, Clifford Longley has now written a novel. As might be expected, the plot concerns religion, but it is the beliefs of the ancient Minoans and Egyptians, hundreds of years before the time of Christ, that Longley explores in this fascinating story. The framework is a bungled burglary at a small country house in the Home Counties, the file for which lands on the desk of Detective Inspector Robbie Peele. The thieves were apparently after a cache of ancient clay disks, on which there are spiral inscriptions in a language unknown to any specialist in ancient languages. Who would have been prepared to kill for these artefacts? Peele’s pursuit of the origin of the